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Metal recovery from industrial by-products using bromine compounds
Hirata Miyasaki, Arturo
Hirata Miyasaki, Arturo
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2024
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Abstract
Antimony is a metalloid whose properties make it indispensable in the manufacture of flame-retardant materials and lead-acid batteries. Currently, this metal is obtained from stibnite (Sb2S3) and complex polymetallic deposits while most of the metal is obtained from smelters mainly located in China and Russia. In the past years, more than 80% of domestic antimony consumption in the United States comes from imports which is why it is deemed as a critical metal.
Tin is a post-transition metal whose properties make it an important replacement for lead base soldering in the electronics department. This metal is obtained from cassiterite in deposits which are rare in the United States. Tin has been mainly imported to the United States as it has not been mined nationwide since 1993 which is why it is also deemed as a critical metal by the US. However, antimony and tin can be found in industrial by-products from smelter processes which can increase the domestic supply of both.
Given the criticality of antimony and tin and how these metals can be found in smelter by-products, it has been proposed that bromine compounds as a leaching reagent could be an alternative chemical treatment that would increase recovery of antimony and tin by selectively leaching them from the other metals. Therefore, the following work presents a comprehensive review of the technical and economic feasibility of developing a viable technology for bromine as a leaching reagent. To this end, five cycles of experiments were performed on different samples provided by the sponsoring companies. One main acid -HBr- was used to evaluate the effect of temperature, time, solid concentration, additional bromine ions, and their possible interactions.
The results showed the possibility of recovering more than 80% of antimony and 50% of tin from the by-products. Likewise, results showed the possibility of further separation of antimony from solution by forming a precipitate composed of antimony, bromine, lead, and oxygen. A kinetic model was designed to understand the rate-controlling mechanisms that were present in the leaching process when utilizing bromine compounds. A flowsheet introducing multiple-stage acid leach was designed and studied to estimate the capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenses related to its potential implementation on an industrial scale. A preliminary economic evaluation of the proposed flowsheet yielded positive results, which suggests that bromine compounds as leaching reagents are a highly attractive process for industrial by-products.
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